An analysis of Machaut’s B18

When I was approached by Michael Tenzer and asked to contribute a chapter to a follow-up volume to his Analytical Studies in World MusicI have to admit to being a little mystified. Although I was present when Nicholas Cook gave the paper that declared that ‘we are all ethnomusicologists now’, and although I work in the UK where the subdisciplinary divisions between musicology, ethnomusiology, and music theory are rather more fluid at the institutional level, I wasn’t quite prepared for a book with such a title to include a repertoire quite as historically distant as the music as Guillaume de Machaut. Nonetheless, I was happy to oblige.

Working with Michael and his co-editor on the second volume of Analytical Studies in World Music (titled, eventually, Analytical and Cross-Cultural Studies in World Music) was very rewarding. As editors they engaged in detail with my analysis and its pre-suppositions and made me make more precise my description of what I was doing in it. The result, I think, is a more limpid explanation of my method of approaching the musical material of fourteenth-century song than I have published before, and something that I hope will offer a ‘way in’ to those not primarily interested in the Middle Ages, but quite fascinated in musical structures of all kinds, as well as those interested in the text-music relations of other song repertories.

Unfortunately the publishers, Oxford University Press–an institution that is supposedly a department of my own institution–were categorical in their refusal to allow me to post a copy on my personal website or in my institutional repository (see here for my early blogpost moaning about this). I think that’s a huge shame, because the title of the book that it’s in will not make my chapter an obvious find for scholars of Machaut or for students of pre-tonal Western music theory and analysis. Luckily there is partial access to it via Google Books (click here to link to the chapter on Google Books).

The chapter is in a number of sections; the opening section on Background gives an overview of the kinds of song the piece represents, and includes an image of what it looks like in one of the manuscript sources; Analytical Method outlines my approach to the song’s underlying dyadic counterpoint; the next sections present the analysis, giving an Overview of Form and Rhythmic Organization, an Analysis of Counterpoint and Tonal Structure, Cadences and Tonal Orientation, Tonal Narrative (covering first the balade’s A section, then its B section and Refrain), an Interim Summary, a section on the Triplum Part, and a full Summary of the Analysis. The final sections give details of Text and Context, Broader Contexts, and B18 Today (a discussion of several recordings, one of which can be heard on the book’s accompanying website).